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Yesterday AT&T released four international data plans for the iPad 3G with prices that do not come cheap. Pricing starts at $25 per month for 20 megabytes and going as high as $200 for 200 megabytes. Unlike the normal data plans, these international plans do not auto-renew on a month to month basis.

Frasier Speirs, one of several well-publicized developers to leave the iPhone over objections to Apple's App Store policies and controversy surrounding app rejections, has decided to return, post iPad, and his reasons are intriguing:

I suspect that the days of everyone buying a MacBook to get online are soon to be over. I've already written about how I see our three-Mac family turning into a one-Mac, three-iPad family over the next hardware cycle and I imagine that scenario repeated industry-wide over time. Already the ratio of iPhone OS devices to Macs is 5:2.

He believes Apple can and will reject apps, and that the frontier days of computing are giving way to the mainstream, appliance future.

Big week for Apple patent pr0n, as in addition to getting a patent for the original 2007 iPhone 2G design, Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, et al are not being granted a patent for the 2008/2009 iPhone 3G/iPhone 3GS design as well. And not content with hardware alone, Apple has filed for patents on almost all their Home Screen and App Store icons (we couldn't find Calendar, which means its either too generic or we just couldn't find it).

So fair warning to all the iClone manufacturers without prior art or $40 billion in the bank -- start visual differentiation plans now.

As to the icons, at almost 1000x1000 pixels and with detail to match, it shows just how obsessive Apple is when it comes to their products and while other OS and devices may use the same app-launcher paradigms, they don't seem to be slaving over every last detail -- in art, consistency, multitouch panel quality, and touch detection software quality -- Apple is putting in. Just amazing. (Except for those diagonal stripes).

During the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama sent out her first tweet, via CNN's Ed Henry. After light-hearted negotiations and getting clearance from the top -- the very tip top -- Henry typed the tweet out on his iPhone on Mrs. Obama's behalf:

"from flotus: 'here at dinner this is officially my first Tweet. i am looking forward to some good laughs from the potus and jay'".

Apple has just announced sales of 1 million iPads since the US debut on April 3, along with 12 million app downloads from the iTunes App Store and 1.5 million ebook downloads from the iBookstore. Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, is happy:

“One million iPads in 28 days—that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone. Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.”

Apple's iPad Wi-Fi + 3G debuted on April 30 and unofficial tallies have its sales of those SKUs at 300,000.

An amazing debut by any standards, but will growth match that of the iPhone?

Citing the usual "people familiar with the matter", the New York Post claims the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commissions are negotiating over which one of their organizations will inquire into Apple's new iPhone OS 4 SDK section 3.3.1 -- the restriction against cross-compilers in general and Adobe's Flash CS5 Packager for iPhone in specific.

The iPad 3G + Wi-Fi was released this past Friday and on that very day Dev Team member MuscleNerd showed the world it was jailbroken. The new iPad proved to be vulnerable to comex’s “Spirit” jailbreak. Unfortunately, the software is not yet publicly available but it should be released soon.

Any of our readers getting a itchy trigger finger to jailbreak you iPad? Sound off in the comments!